Fortnightly Mailing

Michael Stevenson (DfES Director of Technology) - an interview which is worth listening to

This recent 10 minute interview by JISC with Michael Stevenson [MP3 file], DfES Director of Technology, is worth listening to closely if you work in or have commercial interests in English public sector education, despite its inevitabe "JISC focus". If you listen, you may find useful the diagrams in the first few slides from this March 2006 presentation by Adrian Hall [PPT file], who reports to Stevenson, as "Programme Director for Personalised Content".  Note (22/7/2006). Michael Stevenson announced his resignation from DfES on 14/7/2006, with effect from the end of August, and the DfES announced that responsibility for the e-Strategy would pass to Becta.

To his credit, Stevenson is hot on the importance of leadership in producing change, and on the need for a simplified, silo-free, cross-sectoral approach that works across the whole of publicly funded education.

But I am more sceptical about the apparent dominance in his thinking of personalised learning, which he describes as "the great issue of the day", with one of the DfES's "early wins" being "the personalised e-learning strategy". Nor do I share his optimism about e-portfolios. The DfES, says Stevenson, is "very close to a way forward on e-portfolios"; but I think that even if the sort of e-portfolio that is envisaged is "only" a transcript of a person's qualifications, there are enormous, uncosted, technical, security, and organisational challenges in getting this to work in an education system that is as decentralised as England's.

Obviously the current £6b plus NHS computerisation project is about much more than a computerised patient record, but nevertheless, if (as is the case with the NHS) a very centralised and costly project is needed to get the patient record in place, why would things be any different to get a computerised learner record (i.e. portfolio system) in place in education?

Meanwhile the political emphasis in educational policy is on decentralisation of decision-making; and the Web and the ICT infrastructure are quickly developing in such a way that educational providers face an "inevitable future" in which they cannot realistically hope to control the access devices, or the connectivity, or the content, or necessarily the e-learning tools and systems, that learners and teachers choose to use in their learning.

", despite its inevitabe JISC focus" added to opening sentence - 28/5/2006.

Using Blogger to get teachers started with e-learning. Guest contribution from Keith Burnett.

Mark Berthelemy sounds a prudent note of caution about using 'free stuff' in his recent guest contribution. I understand the concerns, but I would add that these systems have enabled some colleagues to get started with small practical projects, and these projects have lead to greater use of our College's VLE.

I work in an adult learning context, and many of our students attend college once a week in the evening or weekend. Many students now have access to the Web outside college, and those that don't often make use of the College drop in facilities. Simple class blogs can be used to post summaries of key points, exercises, links to Web pages of value, and to provide a sense of continuity and encourage engagement with the material.

This academic year, I have been suggesting the Blogger system as being easy to set up, flexible to administer with good control over comments, and allowing blogging by e-mail. A one hour training session [ pdf, 1.3 MB ]  has been repeated a couple of times, and colleagues have seen the benefit of spending half an hour a week posting links and summaries. Students appreciate the effort and make use of the pages.

Fiona Williams posts a blog for Chartered Institute of Management Accounting students at the College, and has run training sessions on blogger in her role as an e-guide in the Finance and Accounting curriculum area. Fiona runs this page as a multi-author blog and students from different classes will use the page for hints, tips and links. The manager in the area, Sian Houseago, is building on the success of the blogs by piloting Moodle courses for students on Association Accounting Technicians programmes. I have found that colleagues who have taken ownership of a simple blog page and who have kept that page fresh and relevant are open to using e-learning in a more sophisticated way using some of the tools that Mark describes.

In conclusion, I can't resist linking to a couple of podcasts and my favourite free Web services:

• 5 minutes on Carbonyls by David Cox [ 2 MB, mp3 ] provided for AS Chemistry students to pop on their MP3 players;
• 4 minutes on Blogs in education [ 1.6 MB, mp3 ];
• ScanR - image whiteboards with your phone camera and have the results delivered as a PDF file. This service actually does work rather well. There is no online storage of your work - the transaction is sending and receiving an e-mail.

About the author: Keith Burnett works as a Maths teacher and ILT development co-ordinator at Sutton Coldfield College. He can be contacted at keithb 'AT' bodmas.org.

Getting to grips with Moodle. Guest Contribution from Julia Duggleby.

In spring 2005 the Sheffield College adopted Moodle as its Virtual Learning Environment. Online and blended learning wasn’t a new venture for the College, we’ve been delivering online learning since 1997 using a variety of platforms, including bog-standard webpages, an internally developed content management system (MySheffcol), and various other VLEs.

My main experience of Moodle is in:

• the development of two online courses;
• the delivery of one online course;
• supporting College staff in developing/uploading their own content and activities.

I really feel positive about Moodle. It isn’t perfect – it has some quirks and shortcomings that are annoying, though some of them may be to do with modifications we have made ourselves. For example:

• It doesn’t seem to save Chat transcripts, though it pretends it has and there is a link, which doesn’t work, to transcripts.
• I cannot get the icons to disappear in the Book Module, even when I have “Turn Editing On” turned off. Fortunately they only appear when I am logged on as a tutor, and learners don’t see them.
• Sometimes when creating content I can’t get it to do what I want it to – it is a bit basic. My workaround is to create what I want in Dreamweaver, and copy the html into Moodle.
• I find the top level navigation a bit clunky and would like to have more control over the course hierarchy.

But I feel these are quibbles. Actually I love Moodle because I find it so easy to use. What is it that I love?

• In content creation and editing I have a reasonable degree of control over what it looks like – I can fiddle about with fonts, colour, tables and colour, though it does have limitations (see above).
• It is so easy to move things around. Many happy hours can be wasted shoving elements up and down, and from side to side.
• It has a lovely, and growing, box of tricks that I am gradually learning to use. My particular favourites are Labels, the Book Module, the Wiki, the HTML Block (so simple, so useful).
• The College staff generally takes to it very easily. I find that a couple of hours training and a bit of supported hands-on is all they need to learn enough to at least create and upload some content, and some learner interactivities. The more IT competent/pedagogical imaginative staff then move forward on their own without any further training
• Learners seem to use it with little difficulty. We have had few technical problems with accessing it, and learners quickly get to grips with how it all works.
• It’s free, or cheap anyway because time (money) needs to be spent on it. But it is still the best VLE I’ve used. Moodle is to VLEs as Primark is to fashion (cheap, cheerful, and surprisingly good quality).

About the Author. Julia Duggleby is Online Learning Manager at the Sheffield College. If you wish to contact Julia, please email: julia.duggleby@sheffcol.ac.uk.

Linux - within a whisker of being able to hold its own as a serious nonproprietary desktop solution?

Yes, according to this 2005/2006 Investigation into the viability of Linux as a Business Desktop Operating System by Stephen Fellowes for the UK Society of Information Technology Management. This ~50 page report [650 kB PDF]  compares 5 different linux-based desktop operating systems, against a range of criteria (installation, first boot, devices and peripherals, applications and file types, systems administration, networking), and includes a focus on their use on laptops computers. It finishes with some pragmatic recommendations for corporate users, concluding that:

• versions with a clear link to a major development partner like SUSE or Novell have a "greater potential to provide a fully functional installation", and
• the support of hardware vendors is crucial to the successful deployment of linux-based operating systems on laptop computers.

Citizen Connect - inclusion through technology

Thanks to reader Martine Tommis for this link to the English language version of the Final Report of the Citizen Connect Project [4 MB PDF]. This ~60 page report, available in multiple languages, has been produced at the conclusion of an EU funded project involving cities in the UK (Manchester and Glasgow), Spain (Gijon, Aviles, Valencia), Italy (Bari), Germany (Gera), Netherlands (The Hague), France (Lille, Tourcoing), Finland (Helsinki), Estonia (Tallinn), Poland (Gdansk, Warsaw). The report's 5 recommendations, though they have that "written by committee in such a way as to keep all partners happy" feel, are pretty coherent, and are reproduced in the continuation post below.

Educause RSS feed aggregator

[4 January 2010] Sadly the Educause link below no longer functions.

Educause has this well implemented aggregation of RSS feeds, for a wide range of education-related topics. Useful if you want to show what RSS is to someone who is unfamiliar with RSS as a medium, and how feed aggregation works.

BrowserCam - test how web content looks on different combinations of browser and operating system

Updated 15/12/2013

I wrote about BrowserCam in the 31/5/2004 Fortnightly Mailing and included some sampe screen-grabs. Since then the service, which enables you to submit web content for testing across a large number of browser/operating system/platform combinations, has been extended, and the BrowserCam site redesigned. Good enough to deserve being recommended a second time. Unfortunately, BrowserCam ceased to run in February 2013. A possible alternative would be CrossBrowserTesting, though I have not tried it.

Quick Online Tips

Quick Online Tips has  "Technology News, Smart Blogging Tips, Essential Computer Software, and Web Services”. Access the most popular of these, 6 of which are described as being regularly updated.

The anatomy of an (unreserved) apology

It is sometimes dangerous to comment on a fast-moving situation, in this case the long-running UK higher education pay dispute. But the first 8 or 10 minutes of this transcript from the 24/5/2006 UK Parliamentary Education and Skills Committee [danger - link may have broken] is worth listening to. In it you hear Geoffrey Copland and Jocelyn Prudence, respectively Chair and Chief Executive of the Universities and College Employers' Association, taken angrily to task by Committee Chair Barry Sheerman MP, and apologising unreservedly and nervously for issuing a press release which falsely claimed that the Education and Skills Committee had called for the unions to ballot their members on the employers' most recent pay offer. It had done no such thing.

Snow goggles for dogs

I took this picture outside the Breche de Roland hut above Gedre in the French Pyrenees in August 1979. The alsation was owned by the hut-warden. I somehow prefer the dog's gear to these, which have had "new invention" press coverage lately: